hbhudy
Well-Known Member
Has anyone made a mead with Saison Yeast? I just saw a recipe that used Saison yeast for a lower gravity mead and wanted to know if anyone here has tried this?
Saison Yeast for low gravity mead
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SoCal-Doug
Well-Known Member
Sounds like a super interesting combination. I'de love to taste one made with a Saison yeast. Something like a 3711 will attenuate the hell out of it, but it's definitely going to throw some of the infamous Saison "funk" flavor and aroma.
bernardsmith
Well-Known Member
I often use Belle Saison yeast to make a mead when I want to highlight peppery notes. That said, "attenuation" is a brewer's issue and not a wine maker's. If a wine yeast cannot ferment simple sugars to ethanol then there is something wrong with the must or the yeast. For wine makers there is no yeast whose "attenuation" rate is not 100%. Of course, you can have a must whose total sugar content results in a wine (or mead) with so much alcohol that it exceeds the yeast's tolerance for alcohol but that is not the same thing as attenuation. For all intents and purposes you are dealing with fructose, sucrose, glucose and maltose and all other things being equal if a yeast cannot ferment through 3 lbs of honey/gallon to drop the gravity to below .999 then the mead maker needs to check his or her protocol.
hbhudy
Well-Known Member
I was thinking 5# of honey and pure 2# of tart cherries for a lower gravity mead with the Saison character.
bernardsmith
Well-Known Member
Five pounds of honey in how much volume?
If in one gallon, that is an SG of 1.175 and that ain't low gravity on any place on this planet. If you are thinking about 5 gallons then 2 lbs of cherries in that volume is akin to showing the mead the fruit and asking it to remember what those cherries looked like...Hard to imagine that 2 lbs will leave much of any impression on 5 gallons. Bottom line: IMO, your recipe seems a bit hard to comprehend but you don't really give us very much clear information.
If in one gallon, that is an SG of 1.175 and that ain't low gravity on any place on this planet. If you are thinking about 5 gallons then 2 lbs of cherries in that volume is akin to showing the mead the fruit and asking it to remember what those cherries looked like...Hard to imagine that 2 lbs will leave much of any impression on 5 gallons. Bottom line: IMO, your recipe seems a bit hard to comprehend but you don't really give us very much clear information.
hbhudy
Well-Known Member
Sorry for the limited information.. I am shooting for a OG of about 1050 with the cherries. He batch size is expected for 5gal. I was hoping for the cherries to add a small bit of twang/tart finish so it may be better to double the cherries.
I haven’t tried a session mead with saison yeast but I have done several ciders w belle saison. Honestly, the typical flavors and aromas of that yeast were not present in the cider. For those batches, I fermented at about 75.
So maybe if you ferment higher you can get those characteristics.
So maybe if you ferment higher you can get those characteristics.
I made a mead with Belle Saison, alongside some other meads with other yeasts. All were low gravity (going for 7-8% ABV). They contained some caramelized brown sugar, as an attempt to keep some sweetness after fermentation. I under-caramelized and couldn't taste it in the end. The yeast didn't make a whole lot of difference. If I try it again, I will brew in summer and keep the saison yeast hotter, around 30°C, since this higher temps are supposed to yield more flavors associated with the style.
ShareBrewing
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Tart cherries sound like a good match for the saison yeast. No personal experience using the Belle for a session, but it sounds like a good idea. It just depends on what you’re looking for in the fermentation character. Go for 60-65F (15.6-17.6C) for subdued saison flavor, or crank it up towards 86F (30C) for pronounced saison flavor.
To hit around OG 1.050, you’d wanna do a 4 gal batch using the 5# of honey. The cherries will not boost your gravity. Using 5# honey for a 5 gal batch would land you around 1.035-1.038.
If you really want the cherry to come through, I agree that you’d want to double it to 4# of fruit. If you did a 4 gal batch, then that’d be a pound/gal which is always safe.
To hit around OG 1.050, you’d wanna do a 4 gal batch using the 5# of honey. The cherries will not boost your gravity. Using 5# honey for a 5 gal batch would land you around 1.035-1.038.
If you really want the cherry to come through, I agree that you’d want to double it to 4# of fruit. If you did a 4 gal batch, then that’d be a pound/gal which is always safe.
laughing jack
Active Member
In regards to the amount of fruit you need to add, I have always used Ken Schramm’s book The Compleat Meadmaker for a starting point. There he recommends 3-5 pounds of tart cherries in the secondary for a mild flavor, 6-8 pounds for a medium flavor, and 9+ for a strong flavor. These are all for 5 gallons of mead.
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Jaeger
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Groennfell meadery in Vermont makes a cranberry mead with their wild house strain. They posted a clone recipe (they post clones of all their recipes) and I don't see why one couldn't substitute tart cherries (or juice, as their recipe calls for) in place of cranberries. Here is the link.
https://www.groennfell.com/recipes/nordic-farmhouse
https://www.groennfell.com/recipes/nordic-farmhouse
bernardsmith
Well-Known Member
I don't know that Groennfell still uses a house strain of yeast. I think they gave up on that because it was too difficult to coddle the yeast and much simpler (they said) to simply buy lab cultured yeast off the shelf. When you make mead commercially you have a problem that home mead makers do not tend to have - and that is consistency from one batch to the next. If you are selling a "commodity"-like product (Mead XYZ) then most of your customers are going to want XYZ to taste the same each time they purchase it and if it doesn't (because, for example, the yeast culture evolves over time) then you may find that you lose their custom. IF (IF) you make a product that you know your customers are looking forward to experiencing uniquely different flavors and aromas with each batch (because of the season, the rainfall, the flowers the bees visited etc etc) then the only consistency you and your customers might look for is consistency of quality... And that is a very different kettle of fish..
I notice that Wyeast 4184 Sweet Mead says "Leaves 2-3% residual sugar in most meads." http://www.wyeastlab.com/yeast-strain/sweet-mead By your account, though, it seems that such a thing wouldn't be true.
Well, in "most meads" that'd be stopping at about 1.002 which isn't exactly sweet. But it has an 11% ABV, so theoretically you could load enough honey up front to reach the limit and actually get a sweet mead. I'm gonna try it some day and see.
